CSCI 597 provides a series of expository lectures to
introduce Ph.D. students to the breadth of research topics in CS (and, to some
extent, beyond). The idea is to cycle through the subareas of USC research in
CS each semester.

First-year Ph.D. Students are required to enroll for 1 unit
of CSCI 597 for the first 2 semesters of the Ph.D. Program. (Applicable only to
students enrolling in Summer of 2000 or later.)

Guidelines:
Each talk will be a Tutorial on the given sub area, but may also serve to frame some specific
interest of the presenter. In addition, some lectures will present other topics
of general interest to Ph.D. students.

Before the class professors will (in almost all cases) place on the Web (a) a
good expository article on the topic of the talk; (b) a set of 3 questions
about the talk and/or paper each of which can be answered in at most a page.

Students will be required to submit the answer to ONE question in the form of
hard copy handed in at the following lecture. The deadline for submission of
hardcopies is strict and is the end of the lecture following that to which the
essay pertains. Late and email submissions will not be accepted. All
essays will be collected by the TA at the end of each lecture, and will be
placed into an enveloped that will be sealed and immediately delivered to the
corresponding professor for grading. The lecturer on that topic will submit a
simple grade for each page of 0 (not submitted or trivial), 1(passable but
based on moderate effort), or 2 (a very good effort). [Please save a copy of
your homeworks in your personal accounts, so that you can refer them for future
use.]

One professor will act as supervisor for a whole year of the course.

It will be the job of this professor to ensure that a lecturer is signed up for
each class meeting, that materials are posted on the Web, that papers are
submitted and graded, and that a final grade (CR/NCR) is assigned.

Advice to students on homework:
The questions are designed to ensure that you pay attention to each topic, yet
do so in a way that will not take more than an hour or so beyond the lecture
(unless the topic was of special interest to you). I thus suggest the following
strategy: Print out the 3 questions and bring them to the lecture, then take
notes during the lecture in relation to the 3 questions. By the end of the
lecture, you should each be clear about which question you will answer and have
some good notes toward that answer. An hour with the assigned article should
then be enough to flesh out the notes into a full page response. Each essay
must be submitted at the following class in the seminar series.

Plagiarism Warning:
You are encouraged to use material from the literature in writing your essays,
but you MUST follow normal scholarly practice in doing so.
a) If you want to use material as it appears in the original, you place it in
quotes or display it in a distinctive font. If you leave something out of the
quote, you mark the gap with three dots: ,,, If you change a few words, you
enclose [the new words you write] in square brackets. You follow the quote with
the source and page number -- e.g., Smith and Wesson, 2000, pp. 37-38 -- and
you place the full bibliographic reference in the Reference list at the end of
your paper.

b) Alternatively, if you summarize or paraphrase the material, you need not put
it in quotes, but you must still acknowledge the source, as in: As Smith and
Wesson (2000) have shown, xyz. Departures from these norms will not be
tolerated.